Productivity: Markdown and R code in emails with Markdown Here

18Okt14

Responding to students‘ emails, I frequently have to include small R code chunks in my response. This used to look quite ugly until I recently discovered the Markdown Here plug-in. It allows to include plain Markdown code in your email. The plug-in will convert the Markdown code into nice looking HTML. This makes it easy to integrate code, tables, LaTeX formulas and all the other features Markdown offers, directly in your email without any hassle. The plug-in is available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and the cross-plattform email client Thunderbird. Here you find a nice cheat-sheet which gives an overview of the features and how to use them. In the picture below you see a typical Markdown email in raw format.

The Markdown Here website’s claim is „Your email is about to get awesome“ – and indeed it will! Just press CTRL+ALT+m to convert it into HTML.